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Solidifying framework nucleic acids

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Living organisms have developed their unique strategies during the natural evolution for building hard tissues with minerals, including silica, calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, and ferric oxide [1]. Such biomineralized materials… Click to show full abstract

Living organisms have developed their unique strategies during the natural evolution for building hard tissues with minerals, including silica, calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, and ferric oxide [1]. Such biomineralized materials generally have complex hierarchical structures with excellent mechanical properties. Although bioinspired approaches have led to the creation of well-defined synthetic structural materials ranging from micro to macro scales, the rational design of discrete biomimetic structures at the nanoscale remains a grand challenge. Recently, Fan from Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yan from Arizona State University and their coworkers [2] published an interesting work in Nature, entitled “Complex silica composite nanomaterials templated with DNA origami”. They developed a DNA-based approach to encode nanoscale biomineralization of silica with high precision (Figure 1(a)). Recent advances in structural DNA nanotechnology provide new opportunities for tailor-design near-atomic nanostructures [3]. For example, the recently reported DNA nanorobot functions as a cancer therapeutic in response to a molecular trigger in vivo, it provides the first example for nanorobot from a concept to reality in medical applications [4]. Moreover, framework nucleic acids (FNAs) exploit the Watson-Crick base pairing and structural properties of DNA molecules to create designer framework nanostructures of two(2D) and three-dimension (3D) with a wide variety of shapes [5,6]. FNAs offer not only a fully addressable platform with nanometer resolution, but also highly ordered patterns up to the micrometer, or even the centimeter scale. DNA-mediated growth of inorganic structures has shown great potential whereas nanoscale patterning with controlled sizes and shapes is still difficult [7]. In their new work, Liu et al. [2] introduced the classic Stöber silica chemistry into DNA nanotechnology by developing a novel DNA origami mediated prehydrolyzing clustering (OMPC) strategy, which can precisely replicate the geometry of FNA nanostructures to well-defined mineralized nanostructures (Figure 1(b)). The fabrication accuracy of the DNA-silica composite is presented by a set of nanopore structures with the diameter down to ~3.4 nm (Figure 1(c)), which represents the highest resolution for nanopore production that is comparable to that achieved with the electron beam methods. The shape diversity of the DNAsilica composite is demonstrated by creating a wide variety of DNA-silica composite architectures ranging from ~10 to ~1000 nm, including a 1D fiber, 2D plates, 3D framework/ curvature objects, and hierarchical patterns. These DNAsilica composite nanoobjects feature significantly improved rigidity and exhibit both tough and flexible mechanical features due to the organic-inorganic hybridization. For example, the compressing Young’s modulus (E-modulus) of a DNA-silica composite triangle has an up to 10-fold increase as compared to its original FNA template. By transferring the structural programmability of designer DNA nanoobjects to inorganic materials, they have presented a new bio-inspired and biomimetic platform for highly programmable nanofabrication. The long-standing aim of nanotechnology is to fully control materials with a nanometer or even an atomic-level

Keywords: silica composite; dna; nucleic acids; chemistry; framework nucleic; nanotechnology

Journal Title: Science China Chemistry
Year Published: 2018

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